I’m a Woman Who’s Gone Inside the Male-Dominated Oil Industry—Here's What I've Seen

During the summer of 2013, instead of working in New York City and spending weekends at the beach, I decided to quit my job and move to a less romantic location: the outskirts of a town called Williston, North Dakota, about 60 miles south of the Canadian border. I wanted to learn more about America's rapidly growing oil industry, and Williston was at the epicenter of one of the largest oil booms the United States had ever experienced.

When I arrived, I discovered the boom had created a housing shortage, and my only option was a trailer park located at the corner of the appropriately named Oil Avenue and Energy Street. So I moved into a 2001 pop-up camper with 150 square feet of living space, a fold-up dining room table, and bathroom walls built of particle board. I could see my neighbor’s TV screen from my kitchen sink. Grassy plains stretched for miles on either side of the road.

Briody in front of her new home

Courtesy of the author

Over the next three years, while investigating what is now my new book, I discovered that just a decade ago, in 2007, Williston was a sleepy prairie town where it was unheard-of to lock your doors at night, and the elementary school almost shut down because of declining enrollment. But by 2013 the town’s population had tripled, as thousands of workers, mostly young men, came looking for opportunity. Though people warned me that this all-male metropolis wasn't safe for a 29-year-old female reporter alone in a trailer, I still wasn't prepared for the level of sexism, misogyny, and violence toward women that I saw.

Cases of assault, harassment, domestic violence, and rape dramatically rose after oil drilling in the area intensified, I learned. My trailer park landlord, a woman in her late forties, told me not to go out after sunset; there were rumors of another rape downtown. At a bar one night, a man I was talking with reached over and started touching my leg. I jumped up, paid the bill, and left, shaken. I had to walk past a crowd of burly oil workers standing outside smoking cigarettes. I felt their eyes on me as I hurried to my car. I often saw prostitutes standing in parking lots—possibly as a result of sex trafficking. I'd read reports about women being coerced or kidnapped into sex work, about Native American girls as young as 13 even disappearing from their homes on the nearby reservation, then resurfacing with matching red flag tattoos. Investigators suspected pimps had branded them.

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Whatever reminders we’ve gotten that rampant sexism persists in the United States today, thanks in part to the Trump campaign, I saw it amplified in North Dakota's boom region, where men, the overarching majority, called the shots. They were making the large paychecks, the political decisions, policing the streets. My time in the oil patch illuminated just how far we have to go.

For one, the number of female oil workers is depressingly low. Nationally, 85 percent of oil industry jobs—many of which pay in the six figures—are held by men. By comparison, in Silicon Valley, an area infamous for its gender inequality, women make up close to 30 percent of company payrolls.

And the stories of harassment I heard were even more depressing—women getting called derogatory names, even being attacked on job sites, and male coworkers refusing to work with them. In 2015 Cindy Marchello, an oil worker I spent a lot of time with, sued C&J Energy Services, Inc., for sex discrimination. In her complaint she said she was demoted from pump operator to a desk job because of her gender and claimed she had received $2 an hour less pay than men with the same job title, along with being subjected to harassment. She settled the case earlier this year for an undisclosed amount.

This July Ciara Newton, who worked as a refinery process operator at a Shell Oil subsidiary, filed a sex discrimination and harassment case against the company. One of the more disturbing allegations in her complaint: On August 29, 2016, she found a sticker on her desk saying, "If your pussy hurts, just stay home." (“We cannot offer comment on pending litigation,” the company wrote when asked for comment. “Shell is committed to a workplace free of harassment and discrimination.”)

Most of these women can't file class action suits because there aren't enough women at their workplace to organize. And approximately 98 percent of single-plaintiff civil cases settle in federal court. That means no trial and little attention. Elma Garza got a $30,000 settlement from her company, Garrison Contractors, Inc. She had spent most of her employment being the only woman oil field worker at Garrison, according to her EEOC complaint, in which she claims that, when she reported lewd comments in the workplace, she was fired.

The United States is now the number-one producer of oil in the world, and the industry is only expected to grow under Trump. Marchello no longer works in the oil industry, and she has yet to find another job that pays close to what she'd been earning. But she hopes her lawsuit will have some impact—that maybe one day female oil workers will have basics like equal pay and a safe working environment.

"How do we teach our children and our grandchildren that things have to change if everybody pushes it under the rug?" Marchello said as her lawsuit hung in the balance. "Nobody is going to realize there's a problem."